Case study: Rebuilding the training journey
The Haven Club runs professional training courses for both members and non-members, generally from its premises in London.
Its main website and membership systems are built around Drupal and CiviCRM. But training had gradually become detached from that environment and was being promoted and managed separately.
That created a bigger problem than simply having courses on the wrong website.
Why your events should not sit outside your CRM
Events are often treated as a separate activity from the rest of an organisation.
A course is created in one system, promoted somewhere else, registrations are taken through another platform, reminders are sent manually and attendance is recorded separately.
Each part may work perfectly well on its own.
The problem is that the organisation loses sight of the person moving through them.
That was the issue we found at The Haven Club, a membership organisation running professional training courses for both members and non-members.
CiviCRM with WordPress or Drupal: how does the integration work?
CiviCRM can run alongside both WordPress and Drupal.
In either case, CiviCRM remains the CRM. It stores contacts, memberships, events, contributions, activities, relationships and other constituent data.
Where the two platforms differ is in how that data becomes part of the wider website.
For a relatively simple site, the difference may not matter very much. If you mainly need CiviCRM for event registration, donations or membership administration, both platforms can provide the website around it.
Do you need Drupal — or just a better website?
Most organisations do not need Drupal.
If your website mainly explains what you do, publishes news and provides a contact form, platforms such as Squarespace, Wix or WordPress may be simpler and cheaper.
That isn't a criticism of Drupal. It is about choosing technology appropriate to the job.
Drupal starts to make sense when your website stops being simply a place to publish information and becomes part of how your organisation actually works.
When a simple website is enough
A typical brochure website might contain:
Why Is my Drupal page 20 MB+ and taking a minute to load?
When a Drupal page takes more than a minute to load, it is easy to assume that Drupal itself is slow.
Sometimes it is.
But a slow Drupal page can also be a perfectly reasonable HTML response surrounded by tens of megabytes of images, JavaScript, CSS, fonts, maps and third-party resources.
We recently looked at a Drupal page where the browser reported approximately:
Cloudflare Is enabled. Why Is my Drupal server still being hammered by bots?
Putting a Drupal site behind Cloudflare can make a substantial difference to performance and security.
But it does not mean unwanted automated traffic will suddenly disappear.
We recently investigated a Drupal site that was already behind Cloudflare but was still showing heavy server load, large numbers of PHP requests and rapidly growing cache tables.
At first glance, that seems contradictory.
If Cloudflare is sitting in front of the site, why are bots still reaching Drupal?